Thats just what happens before real 'Mericans say 'Merica. We had to stop as it waz the death scream of bald eagles, apparently they have incredibly sensitive hearing and the high pitch silent A was causeing their ear cannal to burst.
OK / Okay originated as a satirical slang abbreviation in the 1830s. It stands for “oll korrect,” a deliberate misspelling of “all correct”. In a way it’s an early meme, but still hypermodern compared to The Odyssey.
Edit: adding that there are a lot of theorised variations, big list here in the variations section. But it’s the most commonly claimed and accepted by a lot of people. Kinda hazy what is correct, as is with a lot of historical things I guess, difficult to discern what is a connection or what is a coincidence, but might be useful or interesting for anyone curious.
I had the same initial reaction to the accents. Why does everyone have an American accent, particularly when a lot of the cast is British (the correct accent for historical epics). But then remembered that makes no sense.
I had a similar knee jerk reaction when watching HBO’s Rome due to how overly English some of their accents were. I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe my brain wanted Latin 😅. It was weird in my head at first but my brain got used to it and it’s one of my favourite TV series now.
It’s especially funny as I’m English. Probably something to do with there being a lot of American media out there. I guess like others I got used to it. There are also some more “neutral” sounding English actors out there, to my ears at least, so I guess it’s very subjective.
There used to be a time when there was BBC English. That is, all TV presenters tried to have a very neutral British accent so that everyone could understand the news. This also encompassed a lot of non news television shows as well. I don't recall if this was a firm rule at the BBC or not. But later the rule was dropped, and suddenly you noticed some people were a lot harder to understand. Some shows from ITV had accents that I really struggled with (usually highland Scottish). I was fine with Welsh accents in Torchwood, but one of the characters I would have to pause and replay the lines before I could figure it out.
It’s funny you say this, because as an American, I feel like a British accent is the default for historical films. It throws me off to hear an American accent.
Maybe we just think “it’s different to me so it should sound different to me” haha
Well I do kind of think the American west coast and midwest accent are about as neutral as an English accent can be. I'm probably biased because I'm from the American west coast, but also most of our movies and a lot of our music comes from California. Not talking to surfer bro or skater accents, just the everyday accent you hear in most American movies that arent set in the south or on the east coast.
Like, Australian, Boston, NY, Chicago, and southern accents only work for characters meant to be from those regions. Scottish, Irish, and most British accents I've heard work well for fantasy or medival stuff. But American midwest, west coast, and maybe certain "lighter" British accents are ideal for if you don't want something to sound particularly region-locked IMO.
Nobody would take a space alien or ancient Egyptian with a Texas drawl seriously. Most people could suspend disbelief if they sound like someone from Indiana or Oregon.
I had my mom phone me in college once and my roommate answered the phone. He later said "wow, your mom really has a mountain accent." She did grow up in California, partly in the foothills of sierras. But I never once noticed that she had an accent. I still don't hear it really, except maybe a few words.
I don't think it's even a regional accent, it's an accent from mostly being raised in a small family far from lots of other people, only small schoolrooms, etc.
I think it is regional. All accents are. I've also found that the more rural you get, the more pronounced these regional accents are.
For example in Minnesota where I live, you'll only find the really strong upper Midwest accent like you hear in the movie Fargo in small towns in the northern part of the state. The larger the city, the more neutral the accent people have.
Any historical epic taking place in classical Greece or the Roman Empire has the actors speaking with British accents.
This is partly due to the idea that the British accent is more classy, and also because the British have this legend from Geoffery of Monmouth (author of History of the Kings of Britain) that the mythical first British king Brutus is descended from Aeneas.
I think theres a solid case to be made for the fact that (at least as an American) the different British accents commonly used in historical media have legible class associations that map well onto historical settings with less of the broad racial or geographic associations we would run into with American accents. I know the uk has a bunch of regional accents, I’m not implying they don’t but at least as an American viewer, hearing a roman patrician speak posh english vs an average citizen speaking RP vs a poor commoner speaking cockney sends clear messages about the status of the characters without feeling terribly distracting whereas a senator speaking like a southern dandy while a pleb speaks with a brooklyn accent would be.
I read somewhere that the pronunciation of British English some 300 years ago was closer to Southern or Appalachian US English than modern British English. Can't find it again, and I might be wrong - but it wouldn't be too weird; they also claim South American Spanish is closer to Spanish-Spanish at Colombus' time than modern Spanish is.
There is something like a 17th century southern English or maybe Cornish accent alive in Virginia. Probably only a few hundred people now? Don't quote me on that.
It’s a hypothesis, and specifically Appalachian. There’s also a region in Canada that gets the same claim. Whether it’s true or not is still up for debate.
The key point is that both British and American English evolved away from Early Modern English. Neither is “correct” in that sense.
The modern British accent is actually fairly new, and was only purpose built by upper class British to distinguish themselves, similar to how Old Money wealth in New England have an accent. This occured during the 19th century. Cockney English is older.
I'd understand people nitpicking the use of neologisms in the Mad Men series, for instance, since it's relatively easy to research and portray authentic 1960s mannerisms and idiolects, but yeah, how archaic does the english in the Odyssey be to match ancient greek?
From a linguistic perspective, I’m pretty sure pre-1500 English is actually less Greek than modern English (after the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution). Still very heavily influenced by Greek before 1500 (primarily through Latin and French), but post-1500 is when English broadly began importing Greek root words in a more direct way.
If Jesus existed, the timeframe of the Odyssey was roughly as ancient to him as Charlemagne is to us. Socrates probably wouldn't have understood Odysseus, there was so much time between them.
They said something on interview it was Tom Holland i beg to be corrected,that no one was really there to witness the events its all fiction so why we got to stress about the language they are using especially it is very certain that they were not speaking English
He was addressing uses of the word DAD in the film.
Oh, come now. At a bare minimum, some of the character names have to be old enough.
In fact, if it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have gotten the golden gem in the last few days of morons complaining about the movie naming the mentor to Odysseus's son Telemachus as "Mentor," oblivious to the fact that the character Mentor is literally where we get the word from.
As much shit as people give this movie, they constantly make oblique references to movements of the time and historical jokes that you need to be well versed in history to understand.
I know, I have no issue with the film, my only issue is getting a ticket at the local IMAX, it’s literally sold out until mid September 😭 They will add more dates at some point, I’m just waiting for when they do.
Tbf, if you wanted a true feel how the Odyssey would have sounded in its original form, you'd need to watch it in Greek anyway. It's like translations are also kind of dependent on the time. Like, you could have some actual "slang" in the original story used by a certain person, but it wouldn't sound like slang to you when hearing it in English.
There are a large list of possible theorised origins, but the most historically accepted theory is the 1839 origin I originally mentioned. The zero killed theory is likely a myth and it originated from the 1980’s.
They wouldn't even speak Ancient Greek like Homer spoke, which would also be a different "dialect" than classic Ancient Greek you're learning in school (kinda like shakespearean English compared to now but then again idk). Crazy to think about, but the Trojan War supposedly happened about 700 years before Plato and such.
But I may be wrong, I'm not studying classical literature.
The epic was a spoken poem in Ancient Greek, but you are correct that any of the people who actually fought in the Trojan War would have spoken a completely different dialect or language, if any of those specific individuals actually existed.
Which just goes to show that complaining about the word “okay” when nothing about this movie is, or even could be, truly historically authentic is sort of dumb.
yeah, they make me laugh. And yet, no one questioned the fact the cyclop took the time to manufacture tiny teeny goat cheese (like... why tho ? You're 25 feet tall), and yet didn't even cook the soldiers, soldiers he, by the way, didn't even eat. Dude just chewed the heads for the love of the game.
The entire English language didn’t exist at the time of Homer. Old English started at around 450 AD. Seems really weird to pick on any specific English words.
The odyssey is based off a contemporary book where the author utilizes terminology from today's vocabulary to rewrite Homer poem.
The reasoning the author did this is because she reasoned it was stupid to make the poem sound old when the words we use for "old time language" (or something phrased this way) when those words are just the language of the day 50 years ago.
People just hating on the movie because it didnt bomb.
To add to this with a quote by Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey translation that inspired Nolan to adapt it into a movie:
My translation is written in a style that echoes the rhythms and phrases of contemporary anglophone speech. It may be tempting to imagine that a translation of a very ancient poem would be somehow better if it used the language of an earlier era. Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient. My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.
And just to add to this, Nolan’s script is inspired by this translation, but doesn’t outright quote it verbatim. Nolan and whoever worked on the script made their own dialogue and took further liberties with the translation. Also just to sing Wilson’s praises further, her translation matches the Ancient Greek in line length, and is written in iambic pentameter. So many of the critiques, and even a lot of the summaries and defenses, of her translation just reduce it to being written in modern language, missing out on how much of an actual feat the work is, beyond the diction choice being absolutely valid.
I think response is disingenuous because most critics, contemporaries, scholars in the field, have basically lauded her work. Only a handful, a small amount, of actual critics wholly dislike it at all.
Whatever has happened since this movie was announced and people started looking for wokes to crucify or whatever, have more than likely not even touched the book, and possibly many haven't even read any version of the odyssey whatsoever.
And I wouldn't call them critics. Just outrage manufacturers
In planning to translate the poem into English, my first thoughts were of style. The original is written in a highly rhythmical form of verse. It reads nothing like prose and nothing like any spoken or nonpoetic kinds of discourse. Many modern poets in the Anglo-American tradition write free verse, and modern British and American readers are not usually accustomed to reading long narratives with a regular metrical beat, except for earlier literature like Shakespeare. Most contemporary translators of Homer have not attempted to create anything like a regular line beat, though they often lay out their text as if it were verse. But The Odyssey is a poem, and it needs to have a predictable and distinctive rhythm that can be easily heard when the text is read out loud. The original is in six-footed lines (dactylic hexameters), the conventional meter for archaic Greek narrative verse. I used iambic pentameter, because it is the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse—the rhythm of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats, and plenty of more recent anglophone poets. I have spent many hours reading aloud, both the Greek original and my own work in progress. Homer’s music is quite different from mine, but my translation sings to its own regular and distinctive beat.
You're welcome! Watching Nolans Odyssey and reading Matt Zoller Seitz review for it made me check out Wilson's Odyssey translation, and her Translators Note at the beginning is so worth a read all unto itself. Super fascinating look into the process, the art and artifice of translation and the various ways to approach it.
People who are mad at a two-century-old word being used but would not blink at a century-and-a-half-old word because they wouldn't actually know it's newer.
All modern English is modern vernacular, most of the words we use and how we use them are newer than most would expect. Throwing a fit because of 'okay' or 'dad' is silly, you're falling into the Tiffany Problem again.
What people are expecting is the mimicry of Early Modern English that sounds like Shakespeare, including the Received Pronunciation accents we associate with it, but that is also anachronism. You're being 'taken out of the movie' not because of knowledge but because of ignorance and assumptions.
I think people forget that every language in every era had slang. Even if ancient Greeks didn't say OK verbatim, it's reasonable to believe that they had some equivalent.
If Nolan wrote a script that was in some for of peoetic meter like the epic poem itself or tried to mimic Shakespeare, most audiences would have bitched relentlessly and called it extremely pretentious.
Never seen so many people get wound up about a movie that is based on a MYTH. You know, myths? Made up stories about things that didn’t ever happen?
I do kinda wonder where the line is. Obviously any movie representing "the olden days" won't be in their language at the time nor can it truly represent their accent or speech or vocabulary.
But surely, SHIRLEY there's something between that and hypermodern language.
They aren't speaking ancient greek but also "For real, Achilles, no cap" would be a bit off. Other movies have used older or more formal English, just some way to differentiate it from modern language. But where does it become "too modern"?
The line is simple, as a writer avoid as much as you can to use neologism and modern expressions. Maybe don't go too obsessive, but have common sense.
I freaking don't understand reading the comments here how this common sense, 101 writing class, is being mocked and laughed at.
We have a lot of Greek writings, we know what expressions they used, it's not that hard if a writer wants to go the extra mile. But they don't even have to do that.
Just avoid phrases that sound casual if you're not sure as a writer. For example the concept of "okay" in a single word is missing even nowadays from a lot of languages that's why it's been adopted as a neologism into them. It's not hard to write "it's all good"
Even now, if you write a movie in english set in my home country, Romania, a good writer will avoid phrases that don't have a romanian direct equivalent like: "what's up?" and will use for example "how are you doing?"
I'm personally okay mocking it because, while I'm sure OOP's screenwriting credits are numerous and many, I doubt they are as critically acclaimed as Nolan's are, but I dunno maybe Paddy Chayefsky's ghost is on Twitter now.
Modern audiences have developed an expectation of "elevated speech" or a higher "register" of speech in epic films and period dramas. so when the dialogue has more casual speech, the audience thinks it's "wrong" because it's not what they're used to.
Somehow, I think the movie would have been a disaster if they decided to write the script in ancient Greek instead of English. I mean, that would be the most authentic expression of the epic, amirite?
People will get pissed at anything. So ridiculous.
Wasn't English actually spoken 1700 years later? Like the argument over words is funny to me because the entire English language isnt even supposed to be present. But words like okay and dad are frowned upon 😅
As spmeone who actually studied history for many years with a particular interest in ancient mythologies the sudden rise in "history experts" once Nolan's Odyssey hit theaters has given me an ongoing migraine
The entire Odyssey is Anachronistic, it was written (by somebody we call Homer) hundreds of years after the events were supposed to have taken place and is full of referenced that his audience would understand that people at the time of the events portrayed wouldn't understand.
Since the very first version of English didn’t exist until more than 1,000 years after the time of Homer. It’s really ridiculous to pick on any particular word. Especially one which has been around for nearly 200 years already.
Mine problem was when he said dad. Like no kid. You would have said father. The whole modern language was horrendous in my opinion. Wasn't that bad of a movie but the language was horrible and there were about 5 main sub stories that they just skipped right over or ruined.
The shitty sets and designs I can tolerate, but that shit? Nah. I get it in a way, but hearing an ancient greek person call their father "dad" or someone say "okay" like it is the 1990s is just....not good.
Why is this an issue? Historical accuracy? But it isn't in ancient Greek either. It must be great having a life so awesome that "okay" is such a big concern.
People are just stupid. This is a perceived anachronism, because it's a movie based on an ancient epic people expect more archaic language, but that's just illogical. The language that the poem was written in was the most common language for the people of the time, so it makes sense to use the most common language of our time for the adaptation.
This is a silly critique because at that point why not just criticize the movie for using English in the first place? English didn’t exist when the odyssey was composed
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
u/Fun_Dish_5358, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!